I’m sitting in a dense “waiting lounge” at the very efficient Acton Toyota Service Department and Neil Young just dropped in. Yeah, evidently he’s their car rental shuttle driver. Most people don’t recognize him, but I do…

AWOL since August 22 has two explanations… I haven’t been inspired to make stuff up and I’ve been wasting time arguing with the delusional right-wing on a singles message board.

Speaking of the right wing, the RNC has been interesting. And what’s up with the term “red meat?” The bloviating heads covering the conventions use it to describe language used by speakers to fire up the crowd. Like when VP nominee Sarah Palin described her job as mayor of Wasilla as “something like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities…” Something like that. Governor Palin is a V-PILF all right, but as shallow as I am, she’s not hot enough to get my vote, even with her promise that parents of special needs kids would have a friend in the White House if she and Uncle Fester are elected.

Actually, the more I listen to John McCain and ignore the press filtering of him, the more I think he’d make a good president. Aside from the “war on terror,” he doesn’t share much policy position with Dubya and Dick. Still, his support of the Iraq war is a biggie. I don’t give a shit whether he was right about the “surge.” We shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Another big issue for me is taxes. The right hits Obama by saying “he’ll raise your taxes.” (Btw, that’s a tepid scare tactic compared to what we’ll hear in the next 60 days…) We either need to raise taxes, cut spending, or both. Dubya lowered taxes and then spent like a “tax and spend liberal,” mostly on a destructive war that has enriched his oil constituency by raising the “risk” factor in oil pricing, and corporations like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton through their war profiteering. My point is the cynical Republicans cling to their religion and guns and “no new taxes” pledge, but bury our children and later generations with a national deficit approaching ten TRILLION dollars.

Is that what they mean by “Country First?”